


Live By My Own Law

by scioscribe



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Engagement, Erik Brought Back to Wakanda After College, M/M, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:13:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25869484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: He’d aimed his whole life at the moment he could break into Wakanda. He didn’t know what to do with an invitation.Let alone a proposal.
Relationships: Erik Killmonger/T'Challa
Comments: 21
Kudos: 326
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	Live By My Own Law

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aohatsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aohatsu/gifts).



> Title from "Pray for Me," by The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar.

The UN didn’t accept too many interns, and most of the ones it did take on were their own over-gilded sons and daughters, busily padding out their resumés for when they’d actually have to do something that would bring in a paycheck.

But Erik made them choose him, too. They liked throwing in a couple inspirational hard-luck stories, and he played his background for all it was worth. They saw how his rise looked unstoppable—Oakland orphan, robbed of his parents by state violence and unchecked crime, made good via wholesome meritocracy, via the Naval Academy that spat out luminaries like clockwork, via MIT, where, yes, ma’am, he’d gotten one of the half-dozen scholarships set up in Tony Stark’s name. Yes, sir, that was certainly an honor; no, Erik had never gotten to meet the man himself. He sat there in his suit with the price tag scratching the back of his neck, and he smiled at those interviewers, and he made them want to be a part of his future, a part of all the history he’d make.

Even if, in the end, they might not want to sign their names to it.

It was only a couple of months into his internship that he met King T’Chaka. The man himself.

Usually people looked smaller when you saw them in person. Not T’Chaka. In all the footage of him Erik had seen—and he’d seen it all—he looked half-stooped, overwhelmed. A man from a poor, backwater country.

Some of it was an act. But a lot of it was just the white hands holding the camera not knowing what to do with a Black man who was proud when they thought he had nothing to be proud of.

Because the motherfucker had _presence_. He tore a hole in the world.

_Tore a hole in mine, anyway._

Erik brought him a glass of water. He kept his hands steady, the ice cubes not chittering around.

“Here you go, Your Highness,” he said.

T’Chaka accepted graciously, smoothly—and then looked up, realizing what he’d just heard and where he’d heard it. He took Erik in with no recognition.

_Guess I don’t look like him._

“You speak Xhosa.”

“My father taught me.” You look everybody you talk to in the eyes, even if you could get more out of looking away. His father had taught him that, too. “You knew him.”

Watch him now, trying to remember what War Dogs he’d sent out into the world. He finally said, politely, “Did I last see him in Wakanda?”

“No,” Erik said. “You saw him in Oakland.”

And there it was: he saw his uncle’s hand tremble on the table.

_There you go. You made me an orphan, and I made you an old man._

* * *

He wasn’t surprised to walk back into his place that night and see T’Chaka there waiting for him.

Hard to say how long he’d been there, and Erik wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t the one whose hands had been shaking. If he was going to die tonight, he’d known that end would come for him since the time he was ten years old; he'd had those claws in his heart all his life.

“Uncle,” he said.

T’Chaka’s voice was raw, scratched-up like a bad recording. “I don’t know your name. Not your Wakandan name.”

 _Fuck you,_ Erik thought. _You don’t get to call me by a name nobody’s said since you killed the man who gave it to me._

But he hadn’t said it himself, not in years, and the pull of it got the better of him.

“N’Jadaka.”

“N’Jadaka.” His eyes were wet. “Is it too late to ask you to come home?”

“It ain’t home if you’ve never been there.” They’d been speaking Xhosa, but he dropped into English for that: he wanted to rub it in. They weren’t from the same place. T’Chaka had made damn sure of that.

“I wronged you. I stole from you.”

“You stole from all of us,” Erik said, still in English. Was he shouting? Not yet—he could let it ride. He hadn’t lost control. “You walked through my neighborhood to get to me, didn’t you? Or did you just fly in, all safe, so nothing would touch you? So your brothers and sisters down on the ground didn’t get any ideas about how far we all could climb? It ain’t even enough that you don’t help, that you hide in your own little corner of the world. You don’t even let anybody see what you’re keeping from them. You’d rather sit around admiring yourself, getting everybody else’s pity and laughing at them for it, than show what you are and take the hate for it. You think you wronged me? You’re a goddamn king. What you did as a man, I almost don’t even give a shit about. But you’re sitting on a country that could topple everything in the world that’s kept our people down, a country whose name could be a damn rallying cry, and you come here and ask if I want to come home. Fold me into Wakanda. Nothing but Wakanda. And fuck the rest of the world, right?”

“I do not rule the rest of the world,” T’Chaka said. “And what I offer you, I cannot offer to everyone.”

“I don’t need you to make me a citizen.” He pulled down his lower lip, showing his mark. “I’ve been one of your people since the day I was born. Now, you want to get me for all those back taxes, you go right ahead. Otherwise—”

“You want to change things.”

T’Chaka’s voice had gone too even. He’d gotten quieter while Erik had gotten louder.

“You want to change things, to bring Wakanda’s might—our resources—to bear on the outside world. What you need is a way to accomplish that.”

“I’ll figure something out.”

“You are a weapon.” His gaze moved over Erik. “You’ve shaped yourself into one, sharp as a panther’s claws.”

“Like the ones that killed your brother, right?”

This time, T’Chaka didn’t flinch.

 _Still the king,_ Erik thought, and he didn’t much like the way he admired that.

“But you cannot be both the weapon and the man who holds it. If you try, you will fail. Come to Wakanda, N’Jadaka. Learn to wield power without being driven by it. And then one day, Wakanda may mean something different to the world.”

“‘One day’ is something that gets said when somebody’s planning to put that shit off till forever.”

“They could be your plans. But only if you return with me.”

He’d aimed his whole life at the moment he could break into Wakanda. He didn’t know what to do with an invitation.

“What would my plans matter to you?” He was speaking Xhosa again.

“They would be heard.”

“Yeah. I know what that means. I might as well write my local Congressman, right?”

“They would mean still more,” T’Chaka said, “if you were a king.”

Whatever he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. “Last I checked, you had a son already. First-born. Seems like he’d look good in a crown.”

“It’s good that you think so.” That was the first weary flicker of humor he’d seen in T’Chaka’s face. “I haven’t come here tonight so ignorant of the man you’ve become. I knew bringing you home with me, with all I have done to you, with all you must blame Wakanda for, would not be easy. But either you are only a killer—and you are still very young to want to be nothing else—or you are like a prophet. Someone with a purpose, only looking for a way to accomplish it. Vent your rage on me. Save your vision for Wakanda.”

“A lot of words to say nothing.”

T’Chaka said, “You could wed my son.”

It stopped him cold; startled a laugh out of him. “Guess royalty everywhere lends itself to cousin-fucking, doesn’t it?”

“In Wakanda, not for centuries now. But you have never met T’Challa. And any child would not be conceived by both of you, so no defects would result. I see no complications.”

“Aside from marrying your son off to somebody you just met. You do a lot of these arrangements, Uncle? Hey, what if I’m more interested in the princess? You offering her up too?”

“She is too young. And you are _not_ more interested—even if I had an older daughter.”

“That’s a lot of research to have packed into the couple of hours between the UN and here. But I guess you have people to do that kind of thing for you.”

T’Chaka said nothing.

“Prince T’Challa,” Erik said. He wanted to prove he knew the name. “His interests matter? Or does he just do what you tell him to?”

“He is a loyal son. I cherish that loyalty, and I keep it by not giving him a duty he would not willingly fulfill.”

Nice, fancy way of saying T’Challa wouldn’t much mind this particular bit of cousin-fucking. Erik thought back to what he’d seen of Prince Charming: quiet, gracious, controlled in his movements, handsome as all hell. He felt like he was balanced on the edge of a knife: long-term plans vs. speed chess. What did it matter what game he played, as long as he came out the winner? And if he got his mouth on T’Challa and sucked him off until all that royal composure was in shreds, well, why turn down a good thing?

“All right,” Erik said.

T’Chaka stood. “I will make preparations for our exit, then. You will have several days to pack—more, if you require that.”

“Nah. There ain’t that much around here I want to take with me. I travel light.”

“Do you want to serve out what is left of your time at the UN?”

“Fuck my time at the UN. World figured out how to turn working for no pay into one more kind of slavery, it’s just that this time it ain't weighing down the ones not getting paid. If you need money, you got to settle for a little, and a little’s all you’re gonna have your whole life. If you don’t need it, if you can coast for a couple of years on a trust fund your daddy set up for you, then later you get it all. I got no loyalty to any of that.”

T’Chaka studied him, like this was more than he’d ever thought about it. Finally, he said, “We do not do such things in Wakanda.”

“I don’t need any time to get ready,” Erik said. “I can leave right now.”

* * *

Prince Charming met them on the landing pad, like the Wakandan equivalent of meeting them at the airport, like he wanted to prove what a picture-perfect fiancé he was.

And he did make a good picture, Erik would give him that.

T’Chaka stood between them while they sized each other up.

“My son,” he said, “this is your cousin, N’Jadaka.”

“You forget that he's also my intended,” T’Challa said. He’d never spoken in any of the audio clips Erik had on the royal family, and his voice was more melodious than Erik would have guessed: more amused, too, like being engaged to a dude he’d never met before was pretty funny when he got right down to it. He held out his hand. “N’Jadaka, I am T’Challa.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.” In English, to see if it would throw him off. It didn’t seem to. They shook hands, and Erik didn’t have to test his grip to know how strong it was. He could feel it, power thrumming under T’Challa’s skin like electricity.

“I was pleased you agreed to my father’s offer,” T’Challa said. He started walking, and Erik found himself following, if you could call it that when they were still side-by-side.

“You make your mind up fast, then. A couple hours before that, you didn’t even know I was alive.”

“I believe in our family’s honor. What has been damaged, the two of us can restore.”

 _Oh, you really do run and jump when daddy tells you to, don’t you,_ Erik was thinking, and then T’Challa added:

“Of course, I also asked to see a picture.”

“Of me?”

T’Challa inclined his head.

“Honor wouldn’t matter so much if I were ugly, is that it?”

“It would,” T’Challa said. “But I may not have looked forward to your arrival with the same anticipation.” One corner of his mouth twitched, just barely, and Erik couldn’t tell whether T’Challa was fucking with him or not.

Maybe he liked that. He had a good feeling about rough edges.

“And you?” T’Challa went on walking, but he clasped his hands behind his back now. Erik watched his fingers; they were a little restless, but only right at the tips, the kind of movement nobody else would have noticed. That golden control might not have been perfect, but it was pretty damn close. “Why did you agree? Arranged marriages are uncommon in America, are they not?”

“Not so rare somebody in their right mind would turn down a chance to be a king.” Not the way Wakanda did it, anyhow, with the consort getting their own power, their own slice of the pie.

T’Challa stopped and studied him. He had a different way of doing it than T’Chaka: his eyes were warmer, somehow. It didn’t give him the look of somebody unscrewing you down to all your parts, taking you to pieces to see what you were made of. He said, almost abruptly, “My father believes you will serve Wakanda as few of our own people could. Somehow, you convinced him of that. And he believes you will compensate for what I lack. If you want to know why I agreed, that is closer to the real reason. And the picture, of course.”

“Sure.” He studied T’Challa’s jawline. “I’d seen yours before too.”

“What did you think?”

“That you looked like the Ken doll somebody tailor-made for Black Princess Barbie.”

T’Challa moved to a pillar and studied his curved reflection.

“Mirror don’t lie,” Erik said.

“I think you will get along well with my sister,” T’Challa said ruefully. He stepped back to Erik’s side, closer now: the negative space between their bodies changed, shrank down. “I would like to introduce you to her. And I would like to show you Wakanda.”

He probably thought Erik liked him already, but he didn't. He wasn't made for liking people. T'Challa could've gotten it in his head that he'd be the one to change all that, but Erik lost all his malleability back in Oakland, buried it along with his father. Nobody changed him but him.

He said, “Tell me something first.”

“If I can.”

He looked back behind them to where T’Chaka still stood, a silhouette in the sunshine of the open corridor. He was talking with one of the soldier-girls in their bright red-and-gold--Erik searched for their name and found them, deep in the recesses of his memory: Dora Milaje. He’d have to look for one of them on his tail. He wouldn’t be surprised. They'd be fools not to keep an eye on him, and where he had ever been, that he hadn't had somebody watching him?

“What’s he think you lack?” He lifted his chin in T’Chaka’s direction. “What does he figure I’m compensating for?”

“It’s very early in our relationship to want to know my weaknesses,” T’Challa said. Almost lightly, but that _almost_ mattered a lot.

Erik smiled.

He got another one of those looks in response, and this time, Erik had time to wonder what it was T’Challa thought he was seeing.

T’Challa said, “He says I am a good man.” He spoke in his quietly accented English, though they’d gone back to Xhosa somewhere along the line. It was like he wanted to be sure Erik understood. “And that a good man has a hard time being king.”

Yeah. Erik could see that. Whenever he thought about being king, goodness never really got in the picture.

T’Challa nodded, like Erik had said even half of what he was thinking. He said, “May I show you your new home now?”

 _The whole world’s my home_ —but he nodded anyway. He wanted to see this place: the place his father had told him about, with that ache in his voice. He’d had so many sunsets promised to him that he’d never gotten to see. Time to change that.

He’d been all over, but there was no tour guide like a crown prince. Over the next few days, T’Challa took him through the dense blue-green network of rivers, where the rich silt fanned out from the banks and made the earth so lush it was like they were standing in the Nile Delta. There were grains growing there he’d never seen before. T’Challa crouched down and plucked a drifting rosy-white lotus off the surface of the water; he handed it to Erik.

“My mother is of the River Tribe,” T’Challa said quietly. “She gave my father a lotus to wear as a token, when she accepted his offer.”

“I don’t do flowers.” But he didn’t drop it. What was he going to say, that he was holding on to some idea of manhood that didn’t even stem from his own people? He was down for revolution, not the petty shit of rebellion: he liked most of his father’s traditions just fine. He just wasn’t pinning a corsage on his chest, marking him out as T’Challa’s new boytoy. He held it cupped in his hand instead, the petals silky against his palm.

He finally let it fall when they got back in the little plane--little spaceship, almost--that would take them on the next stage of the getting-to-know-you trip, up into the mountains. T’Challa didn’t turn back to look at the lotus on the ground, even though he must have seen it drop.

They saw the mountains, steep-sided and snow-capped, and the valleys. When they walked through one of the villages—Dora Milaje trailing behind them like a distant red-and-gold streamer—people greeted T’Challa with a kind of warm, reverent sincerity that Erik couldn’t compare to anything else.

“This is N’Jadaka,” T’Challa always said. “My cousin, who spent some years in America. We've signed a betrothal agreement.”

The responses varied too much for people to be afraid of speaking their minds to the Disney Prince. Disapproval, hospitality, curiosity:

“To your cousin?”

“Welcome home, N’Jadaka.”

“He must have quite a story.”

And something in slangy Xhosa that Erik couldn’t translate, something that made T’Challa’s cheeks redden a little.

“What was that last one?” Erik said, once they’d stepped away.

“You’re being very quiet,” T’Challa said, which wasn’t any kind of answer. “This traveling is not just so you can get acquainted with Wakanda. I want to get to know you better—”

“I’m taking it in, seeing all the sights. What’d she say?”

“She said you were quite good-looking,” T’Challa said, turning his head to study the cloth roofs of the market stalls they were passing, like they were the most interesting shit he’d ever seen, “only she expressed it—informally. And with particular attention to, ah, certain details. Well, you saw, she was a very old woman—she has probably gotten to the point of saying whatever she wishes.”

Erik let out a sharp little chuff of laughter. He had to switch to English; he didn’t have any Xhosa he hadn’t gotten from his dad or his dictionary. “So, what, she said I had a nice ass or something? That ain’t nothing. You’re that much of a Puritan, is that it?”

T’Challa frowned. “Puritan?”

He couldn’t think of any version of it in Xhosa. “Prude,” he tried, in English.

“Oh. _Prude_ ,” T’Challa said. He paused, looking uncertain for a moment, and then reached out and put his hand gently against Erik’s jawline. He said, “I'm only a prude in the marketplace,” and walked on.

Erik’s skin stayed warm right on that spot, the lingering feeling dizzy and sick-hot, like he’d gotten too much sun.

* * *

Part of the deal Erik had been promised was that the wedding would happen as close to his arrival as possible. He hadn’t come to Wakanda for the sightseeing and he hadn’t come there to chill with T’Challa, either. He was here because T’Chaka had offered him a shortcut to power, and he wasn’t one to take the long road just out of principle. They were getting this done, and they were doing it now.

Throwing together Wakanda’s version of a quickie Vegas ceremony still took a couple of days of bumming around the palace, and he wasn’t supposed to see T’Challa for any of them.

T’Challa sent him gifts, though, mostly delivered by the little princess.

Probably the gifts had some baroque Wakandan context he didn’t know the first thing about, but even on their own, he was feeling them. Kimoyo beads, etched with the markings of T’Challa’s tribe—their tribe, he guessed, since they were cousins before they were anything else. Wakandan history books, written by people who actually knew what they were talking about. Another lotus flower, floating in a shallow disk of river water.

And a vibranium-and-wood mask with a black lion’s mane.

The panther and the lion. American Black Panthers, like warrior-prophets, had risen up once, and Erik had shaped himself off them—off the truth and the rumors, the ones that had made white folks run scared. But then, the Panthers weren’t around these days—Huey’s time was done. _The_ Black Panther, now, was just the man he’d agreed to marry. Maybe the Black Lions would come along in their time, a flood of change rolling out from Wakanda like wildfire.

And if they didn’t come along, _he_ had come along. He could wear this, _be_ this, even if nobody else wore his name.

The night after the mask was the night before the wedding, and Princess Shuri turned up at his door that night empty-handed. She’d come with her Dora every other night, too, but now she was alone.

“No gifts, little cuz?”

“A question.” She sat down in the chair in the corner of his room, folding her legs up under herself. T’Challa had been right—they got along. He hadn’t liked anybody in long, long time, but he liked her. “Will you take the quarter-heart, and meet my brother where it takes you?”

“Quarter-heart.” The only thing it made him think of, at first, was video games, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d already worked on putting a few of those together. But then it clicked: “The heart-shaped herb, right? A fourth of it, that’s what you’re saying. What, I eat it, he eats it, and maybe we run into each other while we’re tripping?”

“I don’t really understand how it works.” She said it like that was a personal affront to her. “But apparently a quarter-dose does not take you to the ancestral plane, and it doesn’t make you stronger—well, not _superhumanly_ , anyway. It would be cheating to eat a quarter-heart and get into a footrace, I suppose.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” He held out his hand. “You got it on you?”

“Yes.” Shuri dragged the word out a little, reaching into the flat, almost invisible pocket on the side of her dress. “But my brother said to tell you that it can be revealing, that it’s bad manners for him to propose it. But it would be fair. You would see him too.”

“Bad luck, seeing the other groom’s whole psyche right before the wedding.” He wriggled his fingers. “Tell him I said yeah. I’m trying to be straight with him. Any hiding I did before I got here was so I could get here; I’m through with it now.”

And whatever T’Challa saw, Erik was sure he’d wind up saying yes tomorrow anyway. He was the kind that’d stick by a promise even if he knew it would turn out wrong.

Shuri passed him the trimmed off quarter of the heart-shaped herb, and he ate it: it had a slightly spicy taste and left his tongue and lips feeling numb. Nothing like getting high right before your wedding, yeah? He felt Shuri’s small hands on his neck and back, slowing his fall as he eased back in bed, and then—

He was standing out on a savannah, with a city in the distance. The twilight had made the city purple and blue, but the closer he looked, the dimmer the colors got, until they just seemed like a bruise, one still fresh enough to hurt. The savannah was brighter. When Erik stepped forward, the movement seemed to shake sunlight out of the grass. He crouched and scooped some of that glittering light up with his hand and blew it off in the direction of the city. He couldn’t tell if it made any difference.

“I think we’re seeing the same thing,” T’Challa said quietly from somewhere behind him.

“Shared consciousness.” Erik didn’t turn around. “All those LSD experiments back in the seventies, and you’ve got the real deal right here. But then, you’ve got it like that with everything, don’t you?”

“We’ve tried to help more than you may have understood.”

“Yeah, I read those books you sent over.”

T’Challa arched an eyebrow. “All of them? Already?”

“I’m a fast reader.”

“I’ll make plans to expand my library, then, or you’ll be finished within a year.”

“You didn’t do enough,” Erik said.

“You’ve seen Wakanda now. And I saw the way you looked at this country—at _your_ country, N’Jadaka. Our history, our culture, everything we have here—it goes deep. How would it not turn thin if we tried to stretch it to cover the whole world? How much blood would we have to spill to protect ourselves, if every colonizing nation saw what we truly are?”

“Maybe that blood needs spilling. Maybe that’s why your pops thinks you’re too nice to be a good king. Because the one thing I know about him is that he wasn’t afraid of leaving some bodies behind him.”

“And look what that did,” T’Challa said. “Look what it has made you.”

“Tomorrow it’s gonna make me a prince. And one day a king.” He spread his arms. “You getting what you wanted out of this, cuz? All this honesty? Because you could’ve just kept sending me flowers.”

T’Challa touched his hand. “I sent you a mask, too.”

A distant lion roar seemed to shake the sky, sending stars falling down on the city.

“The Black Lion,” Erik said.

“It means nothing, until you take it up. The Black Panther has always been for Wakanda—but the Lion could be whatever he chooses. Marry me tomorrow, and you'll always be a prince, and someday sit beside me as another king, but even if you walk away now, you will have that. The right to decide who you will be, and what world your courage will make.” T’Challa smiled, and it was just uncertain enough that it somehow knocked everything in Erik out-of-tune, so that nothing he thought or felt sounded the same anymore. “Or we could make that world together, cousin. Husband.”

Fuck it. Erik leaned in and kissed him, hard, wanting something more than this twilit dream-world could give him.

T’Challa pressed back against him, his hands rough and solid, his mouth hot. Almost real. But still not enough.

Not prudish, though. Erik would say that for him. The man had told him the truth about that.

When they parted, T’Challa looked at him for a long time. He said, “There is something I should tell you.”

Erik waited.

“When the time comes, when I would take the throne—you, like Shuri, like the leaders of any of the tribes, would have the right to challenge me. The strength of the heart-shaped herb would be stripped from me, and we would fight hand-to-hand as equals. If you killed me, or if I yielded—” His lips quirked in a much harder, much less tender version of that smile; Erik almost liked this one better. “But I would not yield. If you killed me then, cousin, you would be sole and reigning king of Wakanda. Not by marriage, but by right.”

Erik had told Shuri he had nothing to hide, not anymore, but he guessed that when you came right down to it, there was this one little thing. He’d known all this already. He had grown up holding the idea of that challenge between his teeth, his jaw so tight it had been like he’d never let go. What the fuck did T’Challa think his plans had been, before that little run-in at the UN?

_I was made to either kill you or love you, cuz. You should have gotten that by now. You and me, there’s no in between. Not with the world the way it is, and not with how I feel when you smile.  
_

“Good to know,” Erik said. At the edge of the horizon, the city was closer now. Brighter. “But fuck it. Let’s have a party.”

* * *

They had their party, and the whole damn country came to it.

The wedding was a blur. He wore black embroidered with gold, same as T’Challa, and Shuri had added their tribe’s markings on that morning, painted on their faces, gold dots around their eyes and down their jawlines.

 _N’Jadaka._ He was getting kind of used to the name by now. He’d probably like it even more after he heard it in bed a few times.

The crown they put on him was net-like cloth, a mesh the changed color depending on how he looked at it; strung along the webbing were a dozen or so hidden kimoyo beads, weapons and shields all at once.

“It is not traditional,” T’Challa said to him, once they were at the reception. “But it's been some time since we've had a king-consort, so the tradition is very dusty. No one would care but the Jabari, and the Jabari never come. They do send gifts, however. We have Lord M'Baku to thank for the collection of black opals and the coffeemaker."

"Where'd my crown come from, then, if somebody didn't pull it out of a history book?"

"It's my mother's design."

Seemed like there was a compliment in there somewhere, or at least a seal of approval. He looked at Ramonda across the banquet table and she lifted her chin at him, maybe saying, _You’ll do._

 _Thanks, auntie_.

He turned his attention back to T’Challa. His husband. He couldn’t get used to how the word sounded, even just in his head, and T’Challa had already been throwing it around like it came easy to him.

Erik said, “You wanna get out of here?”

He was all set to hear some downer speech about how they had to stick it out through the reception banquet, how it was their sacred duty to Wakanda to spend so many hours getting bored out of their minds before they were allowed to fuck. But to his surprise, T’Challa said, “Very much,” with some kind of rough heat in his voice.

They slipped out, with just the Dora Milaje to the back of them. Always there, just like they’d been there before the wedding—only now, Erik had the feeling they were protecting him too, not just making sure he didn’t harm their precious prince or slip some vibranium trinket into his pocket. They were looking out for him now. He couldn't think about that just this minute. They’d stay out of the bedroom, that was what mattered.

He said, “I was thinking you might tell me we were supposed to stay.”

“The wedding is for the public,” T’Challa said. Unlike Erik, he knew how to pitch his voice so the walls didn’t carry the echoes everywhere. “And so they’ve had their time from us. The wedding night is only for us—so there is only one thing we are supposed to do.”

They hit the bedroom, and as soon as they did, Erik hit the wall, with T’Challa’s mouth covering his and T’Challa’s hands roaming all over him. Erik shoved back into him, biting at his lips, feeling like he wanted to swallow him whole. He tore T’Challa’s shirt open, not giving a shit if it was some family heirloom: he was family, too, wasn’t he? He could wreck anything he wanted. He slid his palms over T’Challa’s hot skin, the hard planes of his muscles, and thought about the heart-shaped herb.

“You’re stronger than I am,” Erik said. “Why you holding back, huh?”

“Because I like the way you fight,” T’Challa said, a little breathlessly. He undid the clasps on Erik’s coat and shoved it aside. “I never look for an uneven match.”

“Panther ought to have a lion, that it?”

“And you—” T’Challa moved his thumb over Erik’s lower lip, and Erik caught it between his teeth. “You can whatever what you can win. And whatever I can give you.”

“Big promises for a wedding night.”

“I want to be a good husband to you.” He said it with an earnestness Erik couldn’t cope with. He liked it and he didn’t, all jumbled up: he didn’t want this to be one more damn role T’Challa had to play out perfectly.

He knocked them down onto the bed instead. Let them focus on this, the one thing where he knew they could both get it right, where he was sure he wouldn’t fuck it up. He stripped T’Challa down to nothing and swallowed his cock, gagging and not letting that stop him.

“You’re starved for this, if you like it better than breathing,” T’Challa said in an infuriatingly calm voice, propping himself up on his elbows. Erik lifted his head just enough—saliva running out of his mouth—and saw the sheen of sweat on T’Challa’s forehead, beaded along his hairline. Nah, he wasn’t indifferent. Not even close. He just needed somebody to shatter him, somebody to warm up that cool remove of his.

Erik sucked him, getting him as wet as he could, and then rose up onto his knees.

T’Challa must have seen what he was doing a second before he got around to it. “N’Jadaka—Erik—”

“N’Jadaka. I like the way you say it.” He lowered himself down a little, feeling the glistening head of T’Challa’s cock slip against his body. He hadn’t done this in years, and he wasn’t anywhere near as relaxed as he needed to be to take it easily, but he was doing it anyway. He wanted to, and he’d never shied away from doing what he wanted just because it would hurt.

And he wanted T’Challa’s cock inside him. T’Challa’s lips were damp and parted, his eyes and pupils both gone wide, so he wanted it too. He just wanted to be polite about it. Fuck polite.

He didn’t mean to, but he said, “Call me husband again.”

T’Challa grabbed hold of Erik’s hands and squeezed them tightly. “Husband.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” He sank down a little, taking the whole length of T’Challa’s cock into him, gritting his teeth to stop himself from making any noise.

“We can take more time—”

“I don’t want time.” He spread his fingers out across T’Challa’s chest, bracing himself there as he got used to the stretch—there, so that was what it felt like to sit on Prince T’Challa’s cock. He bet a lot of people in the world would kill to find that out. “You said you’d give me what I want, didn’t you? This is what I’ve been thinking about all week, cuz.”

“Then it seems I can’t refuse you.” T’Challa’s hands settled on his hips. He stroked Erik there as Erik rode him, sending little shivers up and down his legs and back. “You can have the heart-shaped herb as well, husband. Then we'll both be at our full strength, and you can destroy whatever bedrooms you wish.”

“Destroy whatever.”

T’Challa’s hands stilled, but then he said, “If that is what you decide,” with that fucking arrogance in his voice, like he was already sure he could talk Erik out of something if he had to.

Erik wasn’t thinking about that now, though, and he sure as hell wasn’t thinking about it as T’Challa closed one hand around his cock and pumped him almost lazily—doing it at a rhythm Erik then wound up falling into as he rode him.

“Tighter,” Erik said. “Your hand on my hip, man, tighter.”

T’Challa did as he asked, and Erik half-closed his eyes, thinking about the bruise it would leave, the shape of T’Challa’s handprint on his skin. That was all he wanted. Some goddamn personal hurt for a change, like for a minute the world had narrowed down to just the two of them.

And the future would be theirs, whatever they could talk each other into. He opened his eyes, watching the way they moved together. It looked right.


End file.
